Sunday, August 26, 2012

You know what makes baseball the awesome sport it is? It's that, every once in a while, the impossible somehow becomes possible.

But not like this.

Not in an Aug. 25 entry in the old transactions column that defies comprehension -- even for people who have worked in baseball for many, many years.

What has just transpired, on an unforgettable Saturday afternoon in Boston and Los Angeles, is a trade unlike any you might ever see again. Nine players. A quarter of a billion dollars in contracts. No-trade clauses turning irrelevant. Waiver red tape be damned.

It's amazing. Astonishing. Un-be-frigging-lievable.

"There has never," said one longtime club official Saturday, "been anything like this."

Never. That pretty much describes the magnitude of a Red Sox-Dodgers megadeal that figures to reverberate through the annals of baseball-trade history for at least the next 87 centuries.

We have never seen a trade in which a team dumped this much money in a single transaction.

We have never seen a trade in which two players with more than $100 million left on their contracts (Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford) were moved, let alone in the same direction, to the same team.

And we have never seen a deal this big, this complicated, go down in August, a time when so many barriers are built in to prevent it.

So how could a trade like this possibly happen -- especially now?

It took, almost literally, the perfect storm. That's how.

On one side of this deal, you had a team in Boston that had begun to unravel on every level and needed desperately to push that big red button that said "KABOOM."

On the other side, you had a team in L.A. that had just turned into That Guy Down the Block Who Hit the Powerball Jackpot, with a burning need to spend its newfound gazillion dollars.

There hasn't been a more perfect match ever devised, not even at eHarmony.com.

Stark goes on to classify this as game-changing for the Dodgers, but questions why we took on so much money to make it happen, given the Red Sox' desperation. It's a common refrain. Anyway, this next six weeks will be critical as the first referendum on the deal. If the Dodgers don't make the playoffs, it's not necessarily curtains, but it's close.